Football wins can turn A’s into B’s

Christian Wihtol @ChristianWihtol

Wednesday

Dec 21, 2011 at 12:01 AM

Male University of Oregon students’ grades drop during successful seasons for the UO football team, as students study less and drink and party more to celebrate Duck victories, a new study by three UO economists finds.

Female students also increase their drinking and partying when the Ducks are winning, but that does not appear to hurt their grades, the study found.

The harm or benefit caused by big-time college athletics deserves more study, given the amount of public funding that goes into college sports, the economists said.

“There may be a cost in the classroom” of high-powered athletics, said economics professor Glenn Waddell, one of the study’s authors.

“But we really don’t have any robust analyses of any of this stuff,” he said.

The UO study looked at the behavior and grades of students who are not student-athletes. It looked at their grade data at the UO from 1999 through 2007, covering nine seasons when the football program was rising but inconsistent. The Ducks were 76-35 during those years, including a 4-3 record in postseason bowl appearances.

In general, men’s GPAs tend to run 0.18 below those of women, the researchers noted. Based on the Ducks’ winning percentages each season, the gap between men and women varied. Fewer wins and less hoopla meant better grades for men and thus a smaller gender gap; that’s what happened in 2002, 2004 and 2006, for example, when the Ducks were 7-6, 5-6 and 7-6, respectively. In 2001 and 2005, when the Ducks were 11-1 and 10-2, respectively, the gaps widened.

It appears, said assistant economics professor Jason Lindo, co-author of the study, that the practice of curving grades in the classrooms probably masked any declines in women’s performance. As males’ classroom performance dipped, grading curves declined, too, he said.

The study was published this month in the “Working Paper Series,” a publication of the National Bureau of Economic Research that is circulated for discussion purposes and not peer-reviewed.

Following a win, men reported drinking and partying more, studying less and missing more classes than when the team lost, the study found. The same trends, but at lower levels, were followed by women, except that they maintained their usual time studying, the study found.

“The issue is fallouts from big-time (college) sports, or for that matter benefits from big-time sports,” Waddell said.

The study noted that many universities subsidize their athletics departments.

“There are important costs that policymakers need to consider when they think about the funds that are being directed toward big-time sports,” Lindo said. “There are costs in terms of the academic mission of universities. We wouldn’t go as far as to say big-time sports are bad. There certainly are lots of benefits. Students certainly enjoy them. Communities certainly enjoy them. But when we are thinking about spending in this area, we have to take these costs into consideration.”

The UO administration has long held that the UO athletics department is fully self-supporting financially, with ticket sales, donations from supporters and other income covering all expenses. But critics are skeptical, and some reviews have found some athletics-related expenses that are not paid for by athletics and instead are shouldered by the university as a whole.

“It’s not at all clear the UO’s (athletics are) self-supporting,” Waddell said. “There’s strong evidence that suggests it’s more complex” than the administration says, he said.

Doctoral student Isaac Swensen was a co-author with Lindo and Waddell.

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